hurt. “Well…yes.”

Aleu swiped the wine glass off the table; it shattered when it hit the floor. “You can keep it all! I’m out of this frozen hellhole!”

“Aleu, don’t get angry, your still my daughter and…” Balto begin.

Aleu almost spat in his face. “That’s right, I’m your “little baby.” Sorry papa, but why do you think I left home in the first place!”

And with that she turned tail on Balto and walked outside into the snow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nothing worse then a gambler…except a train robber- Pete Duel, Alias Smith and Jones

 

 

 

 

It had stopped snowing. The switch-lamps in the small siding still twinkled faintly.  Texas sat on the siding. Steam rising from the piles of snow on his boiler as they melted. His pump and injector thumped like a heartbeat. The light in his headlamp flickered and burns, shining a shaft of yellow into the darkness. It was past midnight, and most of the houses in White Mountain where darkened. 

 

 

            Aleu walked alongside her locomotive. Her steel toed boots crunching in the newly fallen snow. She was back in her railroad garb, Her jacket unbuttoned. But that didn’t bother her, even though she wore nothing but a simple cotton shirt underneath. She had a lantern in one hand as she swung herself into the cab of her locomotive.

 

 

“Hey, who are you?” she barked seeing the yellow Chinook from the reception in the cab, he too had left his evening where into work clothing.

 

 

“I’m you firedog, the names Kaltag.” He said lifting a log from the wood pile  “I must say its an honor, a privilege, a treat, to operate with you.”

 

 

Aleu took the log from him “I don’t use firemen.”

 

 

She chucked the log into the firebox and closed and latched the door.

 

 

“I’ve been assigned to you!” Kaltag continued, he pulled out his roster sheet and pointed out their names. “See, Aleutian and Kaltag, #47.”

 

 

Aleu wasn’t in the mood to argue. “Ok, whatever.” She attached an order form to the clipboard chained to the backhead to find her next train “Alright, we have a line of 13 flatcars loaded with iron pipes.”

 

 

She pulled the Johnson bar back and opened the throttle. Texas hissed and moved backwards to the line of flatcars recently vacated by the ten wheeler now at the water tower. The couplings came together with an icy “Clu-unk”

 

 

Kaltag was busing himself with the woodpile. If Aleu was in her normal mood she would have kicked him out of the cab, be the recent events had left her very subdued and thoughtful. And she honestly thought she could sue some company on this trip.

 

 

With a low bleat of Texas’s whistle the train departed from White Mountain, exactly five minutes late, Aleu wasn’t doing so well on her schedule. But she was almost never failed to make up time. Ahead she made out the glowing headlight of the eastbound train, side-tracked and waiting for west bound run, her engineer and conductor doubtless fuming and fretting. Aleu gave a few blats of her whistle as she passed. The eastbounder’s 2-8-0 consolidation returned the gesture with a few high-pitched shouts.

                                    *************

 

 

Balto walked into the depot at White Mountain. Crossing the dimly lit waiting room, he approached the counter.

“Did Aleu sign out?” he asked.

The malamute looked over his list. “Yes she did. Seemed rather upset too…strange, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her upset. I’ve seen her angry, happy, and stern, but never that upset.”

Balto sighed. “I think she is pretty angry with me.”

The dog nodded. “She left something for you.”

He turned and picked dup a box and handed it to Balto. Opening it he found the red dress.

“Shit.” Balto muttered to himself. “I only wanted to make her happy.”

 

 

                         ***************

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I am going to let him take the bone!" Aleu cried out.

Texas was mounting the run up and over the Alaska Range. A helper locomotive drifting downhill had slowed them and cost them an extra 10 minutes. And Aleu was determined to get back on the schedule.

Kaltag did not answer - perhaps he did not her in the sound of the drive wheels of the eight wheeler trashing threw the powder.

 Setting her teeth, Aleu assumed the grim burden with her locomotive. Texas fell over the brow of one hill, with his throttle agape, and the fire seething in his vitals with volcanic fury. Then he lowered his pilot like a maddened bull in its charge. The long, heavy train, Sweeping down the sharp descent, might fitly have been likened to some winged dragon flying low to earth, so appallingly flight like was the motion. It seemed to Aleu as though they dropped down the grade as a bolt of lightning drops from the heavens - loud, irresistible, awful, touched only by the circumambient air.

Texas ran upon a snowdrift at the bottom of the hill, hidden in the darkness of the forest. Aleu saw it in the half circle of the headlamp just before they hit it.

“Hang on” She said to Kaltag.

Texas smashed into the drift, which went up and over his red pilot. Snow sprayed like sand chucked from a bucket. It covered his headlamp, pilot beam, and settled onto his boiler and cab. For a moment Aleu was sure they were goanna hit the ties, or at least throw her and Kaltag into the backhead. But it was only the terrible momentum lifting them momentarily from the track, and in a few seconds - though every second meant 150 feet - the fire-eating behemoth ran back on threw the ice and snow. Yet its beautiful equilibrium was gone; and, as if abandoning itself to its engineer's mad mood, Texas rolled and pitched, and rose and fell, like a waterlogged vessel in a storm. The bell, catching the motion, began to toll; and the dolorous sound, fell upon the ears of the wolven engineer and canine fireman like the notes of a storm-tossed bell-buoy sounding the knell of the doomed.

“Jesus Christ!” Kaltag yipped grabbing a handhold “No wonder you don’t carry firemen! They’re probably scarred of your handling!”

Aleu smiled. She was one of the best engineers, passengers sometimes switched trains or delayed their travel plans to ride behind her. It wasn’t her engine handling skills that scared men from riding the cab with her…it was fear of aggravating her notorious temper. 

As the track became smoother, Texas grew calmer; but his barred tongue licked up the flying space for many a mile before the momentum of that perilous descent was lost. As the roar of their passage over the long bridge spanning the Nenana River, sixty miles from Nome, died away, Aleu felt the first rays of the sun beginning to shine threw the overcast sky.

She blasted her whistle as the thundering sound of the train roaring over the bridge downed out. She glanced at the pressure gauge.

 

 

In the reflection, she noticed Kaltag fumbling with a log in the tender. She saw something shinny sparkle in the lantern light. Watching in the pressure gauge, Aleu saw him pull the rubber off a syringe.

 

 

Carefully, so as to not look suspicious, he held the syringe behind a log, and started for the firebox door.

“Hold on.” Aleu said, still watching the pressure gauge. Kaltag stood with the log clutched against his body.

Aleu carefully dropped the Johnson bar, but left her hand on the shaft. “All right, chuck it in.”

Kaltag opened the door. As he was busying himself placing the log in, Aleu carefully, and look forward, ran her hand along the Johnson bar shaft to the wall, and alongside the wall and sweatbox to where her colt .45 pistil was secretly stored.

It wasn’t there!

Aleu turned and looked down confused, she suddenly felt a hand pull her from the seat and place her in a neck hold!

“What the!” she gasped as she struggled against her assailant, but unlike the other times Kaltag pulled this, Aleu saw it coming. Instead off falling aside in a stunned confusion, she lifted her body backwards, slamming Kaltag into the woodpile. A pile of shovels and re-railers fell onto the two canines.

Stunned at finding resistance, Kaltag lost a precise few second sitting there. Aleu on the other hand, grabbed a crow bar and flung herself up. Kaltag jumped up two, and grabbed one of the logs from the tender.

They didn’t spend much time looking at each other; Kaltag flung the log at Aleu and smacked her in the shoulder. He fallowed with the syringe, pinning her to the floor of the cab on the rolling locomotive.

With one Hand, Aleu grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the syringe, and held it just inches from her neck. With the other, she reached with the crowbar and rammed it into Kaltag’s rear end, claw down.

Kaltag screamed as his tail was broken and sheared. This gave Aleu enough time to throw him off her and reach for the brake handle. Knelling, she grabbed it but before she could make an application, Kaltag grabbed the back of her head and slammed it in the housing.

Aleu went limp and crumbled to the cab floor.

 

 

Kaltag grabbed the throttle and spiting out some blood on the backhead, where it sizzled, he closed it and brought Texas to a crawl. He was about to pass the telegraph house. Carefully he lifted the girl up, and holding her, sat in the seat so she was sitting in his

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